Rather than serving Africa’s internet development, many have benefited from spammers and scammers, while others satiate the Chinese appetite for pornography and gambling.
Outsiders have long taken advantage of Africa’s gold, diamonds and even the wealth of the people. Digital resources have proven no different.
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Millions of Internet addresses assigned to Africa have been hidden, some of which are fraudulent, including insiders linked to a former top nonprofit employee who assigns addresses to the continent. Rather than serving Africa’s internet development, many have benefited from spammers and scammers, while others satiate the Chinese appetite for pornography and gambling.
New leadership at the non-profit, AFRINIC, is working to retrieve lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the very existence of the body.
The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under disputed circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. This is about 5% of the continent’s total – more than Kenya.
AFRINIC made no claims of corruption when revoking Lu’s addresses, which are now worth about $150 million, saying his company was not adequately serving the interests of Africa. Lu fought back. In late July his lawyers persuaded a judge in Mauritius to freeze his bank accounts, where Afrikaans is based. His company also filed a $80 million defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO.
It comes as a blow to the global networking community, which has long regarded the Internet as the technological scaffold for advancing society. Some worry that it could undermine the entire numerical address system that makes the Internet work.
“There was never really any idea, especially in the AFRINIC region, that someone would directly attack a fundamental element of internet governance and just try to shut it down, try and give it away.” Bill Woodcock, executive director of Packet Clearing House, a global non-profit that has helped build Africa’s Internet.
Lu told The Associated Press that he was an honest businessman who didn’t break any rules in getting an African address block. And, defying the consensus of the Internet’s stewards, he says its five regional registries have no business deciding where IP addresses are used.
“AFRINIC should serve the Internet, it’s not going to serve Africa,” Lu said. “They’re just bookkeepers.”
By revoking Lou’s address block, AFRINIC is attempting to reclaim critical address space for a continent that lags behind the rest in leveraging Internet resources to raise living standards and promote health and education. Is. Africa is allocated just 3% of the world’s first generation IP addresses.
Making things worse: The alleged theft of millions of AFRINIC IP addresses involving the organization’s former No. 2 officer, Ernest Byruhanga, who was fired in December 2019. It is not clear whether he was acting alone.
The registry’s new CEO, Eddie Kayhura, said at the time that he had filed a criminal complaint with the Mauritius Police. They shook the management and started trying to retrieve the wayward IP address block.
While billions of people use the Internet every day, its inner workings are poorly understood and rarely investigated. Globally, five fully autonomous regional bodies, acting as non-profit public trusts, decide who owns and runs the Internet’s limited store of first-generation IP address blocks. Established in 2003, AFRINIC was the last of five registries to be created.
A decade ago, the pool of 3.7 billion IP addresses of the first generation, known as IPv4, was completely exhausted in the developed world. Such IP addresses are now sold at auction for between $20 and $30 each.
The current crisis was triggered by the revelations of alleged fraud at AFRINIC. The misuse of 4 million IP addresses by Bayahuranga and probably others, worth more than $50 million, was discovered by Ron Gilmette, an independent Internet investigator in California, and revealed by him and journalist Jan Vermeulen of the South African tech website MyBroadband. Byahuranga is believed to be living in his native Uganda, but he could not be traced for comment.
The CEO of AFRINIC from 2003 to 2015, Adil Akplogan, told the AP that he was not aware at the time of Byahuranga’s alleged misuse of addresses.
“I don’t know how he did it,” said a Togolese Akplogan, who is currently vice president for technical engagement at ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a California-based body that specializes in global network addresses and domains. takes care of. Name the businesses “And those who know the reality about my management of AFRINIC know full well that this is not something I would know and let it go.”
The ownership of at least 675,000 wayward addresses is still in dispute. Some are controlled by an Israeli businessman who has sued AFRINIC for trying to retrieve them.
Many of the disputed addresses continue to host websites with nonsensical URL addresses such as www.mzcmxx.com and which include gambling and pornography aimed at audiences in China. AP also found similar websites using IP addresses that Lu got from AFRINIC. While those sites are banned by the government in China, they can still be accessed there.
Lu said such sites make up a small proportion of websites that use his IP address and that his company has strict policies against posting illegal content such as child pornography and terrorism-related content. He said he does not actively police the content of the millions of websites hosted by lessees, but that all actionable complaints of illegal activity are promptly forwarded to law enforcement.
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